by Brett Adams
I had stolen from these people for one reason, and one reason only: they were the biggest suckers.
Earlier that morning, as I had been plying the street corner, I had felt a creeping sense of looking-for-suckers and been appalled by it. Homing in on the kind, the weak. Men and women dressed well, with smiles sitting beneath eyes with a touch of guilt at their own success.
My jaded spirit had given me the realization that there weren’t enough suckers on the street (or, at least, I couldn’t spot them); serendipity had put me across a park from a church.
To profile people for those most easily parted with their money was an alien thought to me, but it had crystallized alarmingly fast in the face of need. Pragmatism had trumped morality in the time it took to cross the street, and walk half a block.
The singing began, my cue to leave. Act the embarrassed guy in the wrong church.
It wasn’t until I had made the foot of the steps outside that I heard a voice.
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?”
I had determined to keep walking, when it said, “You left these.”
I turned, and saw a man.
It took me a moment to interpret the question in his eyes and the tentativeness in his step. He moved like one approaching a wild animal that might scare and bolt. (“Hey there, little fella.”)
“You left these,” he said, holding up the sunglasses I had stolen from a pharmacy rack. Maybe part of me had meant to leave them on the pew.
“Thanks,” I said, and took them from his extended hand, “although, maybe these belong in a church.” (Didn’t you lay bad things on an altar?) It was meant to be a joke, but the guy had no idea what I was talking about.
I turned to leave.
“I couldn’t help noticing you also took something.”
“Sorry?” and I realized this was the man who had been standing in the aisle helping the money-beanie cross the gaps.
“The offering,” he continued. “You made a withdrawal.”
A withdrawal. One way to put it.
I knew without speaking that my face would refuse to play along with a lie. The man took my silence as an opportunity to continue.
“I don’t know what your story is—I mean,” his gesture took in all of me, “you don’t look like you’re starving. Maybe it’s drugs—“
“It’s not drugs.”
“Okay. Just tell me how much you took.”
I glanced dumbly at my jeans pocket.
“I don’t know.” I dug a hand into the pocket to retrieve the stolen money, but the man held up a forestalling hand.
“Leave it. I’ll take a guess.”
“A guess? What are you talking about?”
“I’ll make it up. Just . . .” and he handed me a ten pound note. “‘Here, take the candlesticks too.’” He joked to cover his awkwardness. The execrable attempt at a french accent, and mention of candlesticks, made it a reference to Les Miserables.
That made him the forgiving bishop. Jean Valjean was going on my next passport.
“It’s not drugs,” I repeated. “It’s . . . hang it. A woman is going to die if I don’t get to her first.”
Skepticism fought with some other emotion on his face until he stretched out his hand.
I shook it.
“John,” he said.
“Jack,” I said. Then: “You’re the biggest sucker I met today.”
With a wry smile, he turned and disappeared back into the church, the sound of singing voices swelling and fading as the door closed.
33
So, you need to know about The Killing Joke.
Released in 1988, the graphic novel, written by Alan Moore (of Watchmen fame) and illustrated by Brian Bolland, is the definitive origin story for the Joker. Critics loved it, gave it an Eisner and a Best Writer for Moore.
Told in flashback, The Killing Joke paints the Joker as an average man who had one bad day—the loss of his pregnant wife and accidental disfigurement—that sent him insane.
In present day, he embarks on a spree to prove a point to Batman: he wounds Barbara Gordon, leaving her paralyzed, and kidnaps her father, Commissioner Gordon. He imprisons Gordon in a failing amusement park and tortures him to prove that all it takes for any man to go insane is one bad day.
When Batman finally catches up with the Joker in a funhouse, he gives the lie to the Joker’s assertion. Gordon is unbroken, and Batman will bring the Joker in by the book.
The Killing Joke was shocking for a couple of reasons. The appalling injury to Barbara Gordon, and the Joker’s use of naked photos of the injured woman in an attempt to break her father’s mind, are disturbing. But the part that spawned decades of debate among the fans is its ambiguous ending.
Picture it. Batman runs the Joker down, and offers him help to recover, fearing their enmity will one day be the death of one of them. But the Joker declines. He tells the joke of two inmates who attempt to escape from a lunatic asylum. The first jumps across the narrow gap separating two buildings, turns to the other, and offers to shine his torch across the gap so the other can walk across the beam of light. But the second inmate replies, “What do you think I am, crazy? You’d turn it off when I was halfway across!”
The last page has Batman and the Joker chuckling at the joke as the police arrive. Over the silhouettes of the two foes, their laughter and the whine of approaching police sirens twine until silence falls. Framed are their feet, facing each other across a rain-spattered beam of light cast by the police car.
And then the feet are gone.
And then the light.
Thousands of diehard fans assert that Batman has done what he said he would. Arrested the Joker, as Gordon commanded, and returned him to Arkham Asylum.
Thousands more will assert that Batman finally broke; strangled the Joker, thus proving his point: it just takes one bad day . . .
Hiero and I argued about this, too. Guess who thought Batman killed the Joker?
34
One hundred and forty-four pounds, it turned out to be, including the ten pounds given to me. With it I had checked into a cheap B&B, whose registry now said it was hosting a Mr A. A. Milne. I had decided for false names to start working through my favorite authors, and the author of Winnie-the-Pooh seemed altogether appropriate for the B & B’s cottage decor.
And if you think checking in with a patently famous name (again) was a dumb idea, maybe that tells you something about my mental trajectory. I wasn’t just on a quest any more. I was on a righteous quest. God had my back. After all, the churchman had smiled at me.
I had a day to understand and then thwart Hiero’s next murder plan. With the money I had setup a war bunker, a think tank. I couldn’t concentrate in a hostel (I also couldn’t call Kim with privacy). In addition to my bed, I had a ham, cheese and salad dagwood, and a Coke. I’d washed my clothes with soap in the sink, and I sat naked on the bed while they drip-dried in the shower. I had loaded more credit onto my phone, and had thirty pounds to spare for a train as far as . . .
There was the rub.
If this was chess, we were approaching the end game. I had to stop it here, on the soil of Mother England. I had to stop him here.
But I had no idea where here was.
I took the crumpled wad of Hiero’s notes, and smoothed out the sheet for the next murder.
My index finger followed my gaze. Perhaps I was hoping it would catch on a word, a detail I had missed. Maybe there were other clues latent in the surface of the paper that I had yet to find; braille characters subtly pimpling the paper, or invisible ink that might be revealed by the oil on my finger?
But I found nothing new. I was left with the cryptic clues I had already tried and failed to decipher many times.
How: Observation
Where: Sidewise
When: Too late
Who: An old friend
Pausing to munch crisp lettuce, and wash it down with Coke, I began again.
Death by Observation?
What the
hell did that mean? Hiero had form for twisted meanings. His first victim had been the closest to a straight-up description: attempted asphyxiation by garroting. Following Rhianne Goldman, Li Min had died of poisoning, an overdose of heroin. And Annika Kreider, Chalky—was she still alive?—had been pushed in front of a train, and Hiero had called it blunt force trauma.
Death by Observation. No idea. It didn’t matter yet.
Where: Sidewise?
Sidewise in Time was the title of a seminal science fiction story from the 1930s. In it pieces of the US begin transforming into their counterparts from alternate timelines—Roman legions from a Roman Empire that never fell appear on the outskirts of St Loius; Viking longboats raid a seaport in Massachusetts; the flag of the Russian Tsar flies over San Francisco.
(Hiero had thought the very existence of such a story in the 1930s proved the author was from an alternate reality. I think he was joking.)
As a description of a location it was about as unhelpful as it was possible to be. It effectively allowed any place from the infinitude of the multiverse.
As for time, ‘Too late’, was hardly encouraging.
But Hiero had given me a deadline: 48 hours. Something told me I could hold him to it. He had so far stuck to his own rules from a twisted sense of fairness. I had to count on him doing it again.
That left victim, the key piece of information. An old friend?
A mental tally of old friends and acquaintances in the UK came to, what, three? A school friend who had married a lass from Ireland—last contact maybe an email to wish him a happy birthday three or four years ago. A second cousin of Kim’s who had spent two years as an itinerant plumber in Australia, using our sleep-out as a home base. Again, I hadn’t spoken with him since Kim left. And a colleague, Brian Skeet, with whom I’d coauthored a number of papers—one of which made it into New Literary History—now working for The British Library. The last correspondence I’d had with him was a tiny gloat for a mention we received in the New Yorker, maybe a year ago.
A disturbing thought: if Hiero meant an old friend of mine, which he had to, given he was setting me up, how long had he been at this? Planning such an elaborate frame? And why me?
And how old was old? Which friends could I rule out? There I hit upon a depressing truth: all of my friends were old friends, those that had stuck around. I hadn’t invested in friendship for a long time. Not since Tracey’s sickness.
Of those that still called me friend, were any holidaying in the UK?
This was infuriating.
Below the main items was a stream-of-consciousness of additional notes. Scanning it for the hundredth time, I strained to fish a useful morsel of information from it. One section looked like a limerick written by someone rhyme and meter blind.
Said Professor Spratt With A Smile
I'll Be In The Box With A Vial.
With The Poison I'll Be
Quantum Tangled You See,
Thus Alive And Dead Both All The While.1
What I’d taken for a smudge, turned out on closer inspection to be a tiny digit. The academic in me was immediately put in mind of a footnote. Of course, there was no footnote, but I wondered if perhaps Hiero had copied the text from an online source, and the footnote index had tagged along without him noticing. It also made me suspect my first impression, that each of these précis was typewritten.
But if copied, copied from where?
Fetching my phone from beneath my meagre pile of belongings, I entered the code for the hotel Wi-Fi, then made a search for the first line of the limerick.
The first few results seemed to be about a heart transplant patient thirty years on. Heart transplant didn’t seem relevant. So I tried searching for the second line: I'll Be In The Box With A Vial.
Bingo.
I found the original at a physics nerd site. Hiero had only changed the first line of the limerick, and only one change at that. He had substituted ‘Professor Spratt’ for ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’.
Then it hit me. I was an idiot. Hiero and I had talked about this. Well, we’d talked about the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics, which claims that every time a quantum event is observed, any time a choice is made, the whole universe splits in two. Say the choice is what you will eat for breakfast one morning. According to Many Worlds, in one universe you sit down to a plate of bacon an eggs; and in another, entirely separate, universe you sit down to a plate of kippers. For once Hiero and I had agreed, that if this understanding of reality were true, it was the death of choice.
On making this connection, I couldn’t keep a smirk from my face. Hiero, the little shit, had seeded this beautifully. I should have known the first time I laid eyes on this sheet that it was peculiar—an anomaly among the murder sheets. But the fear and rush had swamped my mind, prevented me from peering below the surface, and seeing what was hidden in plain sight.
Hiero hadn’t cheated. He had known I possessed what I would need to decode his message.
Now that I did see it, it was embarrassingly obvious: it was, to paraphrase Aristotle, inevitable in retrospect.
I had to work backwards to Schrodinger’s Cat.
Fuzzy memories of my college days tickled the back of my mind, physics lectures at eight in the morning.
I hunted around to refresh my memory.
This is the gist: Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment imagined by famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger that highlights the absurdities of quantum physics when lifted from the minuscule scale of atoms into the everyday world.
Imagine, went Schrodinger, a sealed box, and inside the box a cat, a bottle of poison, a Geiger counter and a tiny bit of radioactive substance. Each second that passes, one atom of that tiny spot of radioactive substance has a chance of decaying. If and when it does, the Geiger counter ticks, a hammer swings, the bottle of poison is smashed, and the cat dies. All straight for an observer on the inside of the box.
The weirdness begins when we step outside the box, because what Quantum Theory tells us is that, until the box is opened and we discover the cat to be either dead or alive, it is both dead and alive.
One word stood out: observation. It was an observation—a peek inside the box—that actually rendered the cat dead or alive. Hiero’s fourth sheet stated the means of death to be Observation.
But what the hell did it mean?
Could I observe this girl to death or life?
How could I observe if I had no idea where this murder would take place, or who the victim would be?
Then I remembered Hiero’s blog. To read his posts, that was a kind of observation, wasn’t it? Maybe he was tracking which posts I read—maybe altering his course accordingly? Already I had observed that his plans had some flux to them, some contingency, some reckoning with the real world. He’d had two accounts of Chalky’s death.
My fingers scrambled to enter the URL for the blog—then halted. What if I was about to observe this girl to death? . . . well, if Hiero was sticking with the analogy, couldn’t I just as easily be observing her to life?
A moment’s hesitation, then I finished the URL and hit enter.
The blog banner appeared. (Bandwidth was good.) I prepared to enter the password, but I needn’t have bothered. The browser went straight to the latest post.
I scanned it quickly.
The title read: Bunkering Down.
I glanced at my war bunker—the hotel room, my scant belongings strewn across the bed and scattered beside me on the desk.
Once again, Hiero was writing from my point of view. And I had to hand it to him, he had an uncanny gift for guessing my moves.
I read on—and gagged on the first sentence: “So I’ve got myself a bunker, some dive off Hindes Road in Harrow. Time to lay low.”
Hiero had published my current location to the internet. No password.
A kid sitting in Albuquerque or Islamabad could punch up this blog, find my hotel, and give me a cold call.
A policeman of the Metrop
olitan Police Service could get in his car and drive here in minutes.
How long had this blog post been available?
The whine of police sirens wafted through the open window. Were they coming for me already? I had a flash of recall: police cars scrunching to a halt below my Hong Kong hotel.
No. I tried to double-psych myself. They knew I knew they were reading this blog. Why would I give away my location.
(Evidently my body wasn’t buying it; it was busy scrambling to gather my belongings, and pull up my still-damp jeans.)
No. They thought I was a self-promoting psycho. Those sirens were for me.
No. When they came, they wouldn’t use sirens, would they, preciousss.
They were coming.
Minutes later, with a sweat-soaked shirt clinging to my back, and my things stuffed in my backpack, I paused at the door and said goodbye to my ex-bunker, “The times I had planned for us.”
35
I said before that In Cold Blood was the seminal true crime. But there was another before it.
The non-fiction novel Compulsion predates it by ten years. It tells the story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Lobb, both in their late teens, both sons of super-rich, Chicago families in the roaring twenties. With exacting prose it describes their murder of fourteen year old Robert Franks.
The book won a special Edgar, but what made the Leopold and Lobb case stick in the public eye was the apparent motive for the cold blooded killing. It wasn’t greed, or envy, or passion. The boys did not exact revenge. The reason they planned for months in meticulous detail, drove a rented car, picked Franks up from the side of the road, killed him with a chisel, and left him stuffed in a culvert, was to see how it felt.
Sure, both Leopold and Lobb had read Nietzsche, and were smart little Übermenschen. But one does wonder whether either boy would have gone as far as murder, if left to his own devices.
